Jekyll vs. Hyde - A Comparison Of Two Static Site Generators

It seemed fitting, when I first thought about it, that my first blog post should discuss the engine I chose to power my website. After spending days writing this for you, I’m reasonably confident we both would’ve been better served if I went drinking with my imaginary friends and you just pretended you liked reading it. Anyway…

There are several static site generators/engines you can choose from and your choice is most likely bound by either what features your hosting provider offers or by language preference.
On the Ruby planet Jekyll, Webby, and nanoc are the most popular choices.

Robert Rees has an excellent comparison of the Ruby engines, which he calls “Semi-static CMSs”. His article was written in June 2009, but you’ll find it very much pertinent as two years later these three engines are still firing on all pistons. Largely based on Robert’s review, I have selected Jekyll to represent the Ruby side.

PHP fares about the same: Stacey seems to power quite a good deal of small websites. But on the horizon, on account of his creator, a higher profile engine might end up being Marco Arment’s Second Crack, whenever he decides to open source it. I’ve decided not to include PHP in this comparison because I’m prejudiced to believe that PHP folks are more in the dynamic website camp, given how easy PHP is to get up and go with.

With a static website generator you will spend most of your time producing the content and about the same fidgeting with the layout. Ironically, Jekyll and Hyde lend themselves quite well to a head to head comparison on both features. Not only do both support Markdown and Textile for writing the content, their templating languages are very similar too: Hyde uses the Django templating language, whereas Jekyll uses Liquid, whose inspiration was, surprise!, the Django templating language.

While researching these engines I have put together an example website built using Jekyll and then Hyde on github. While this post does make some references to this sample, you might find it a good counterpart as it covers some of the elements I struggled to figure out.
To get this sample site, execute git clone https://github.com/philipmat/jekyll_vs_hyde in the directory of your choice or simply use github to view the code.

Installation

The best way to install Jekyll is via RubyGems:

gem install jekyll

This will also install all required dependencies: directory_watcher, liquid, open4, maruku and classifier. More information can be found here, but one interesting, if not ironic, bit is that Jekyll relies on Pygments, a Python project, to provide code syntax highlighting. The installation instructions for Pygments, also detailed on the Jekyll install page, are dependent on your OS, but are usually a variant of:

sudo easy_install Pygments

I recommend that you also generate at this point the stylesheet required by Pygments to style your code:

Hyde’s setup, on the other hand, is more involved. You will start by getting the source code, followed by installing the requirements (Django, pyYAML, and markdown), and probably complete by installing Pygments.

Since you’re getting intimate with that terminal anyway, you might want to consider installing markdown2, a faster and more complete implementation of Markdown.

A note on Hyde installation: if you plan to follow along Hyde’s own instructions, step #2 of the documentation offers to generate a “basic website” for you, and then processes this skeleton to generate your website. Unfortunately, this “basic website” turns out to be quite comprehensive, and its processing will fail because it requires a great deal of Python modules which were not listed in requirements.txt. At this point you have several options:

You follow along with me or use my truly basic skeleton which I promise it’ll work or your money back.

You leave the “basic website” as is and prod it for structure and other tricks. Just be aware that what was generated is anything but basic.

You proceed to discover and install all the requirements and then generate and run the website (hats off to you, you man of genius).

Structure

Both languages tend to follow a similar structure, with Jekyll favoring convention-over-configuration, whereas Hyde relies entirely on configuration. Both will read pretty much all files in the structure and either through process or straight copy will generate your static website in dedicated output folder.

Jekyll

The more prominent elements of a typical Jekyll structure include a _layouts folder that stores the templates to build the site, a _posts folder that contains the blog content, and a _site folder where the generated website will be placed. Also typically present are a configuration file in YAML format, _config.yml, a root index.html, and most likely some sort of media folder for your .css, .js, and images.

This configuration is merely a preference. Between command line arguments and the _config.yml file, Jekyll allows you to overwrite most of its options, which can be quite extensive.

Within this structure, Jekyll will attempt to process all .html, .markdown, and .textile files that contain a specific header, called YAML Front Matter; it will ignore those files that do not have this header or those that start with an underscore (including folders). All other files will be copied to the _site folder, preserving the folder hierarchy in which they were located.

Jekyll also mandates that the files within the _posts folder are in a YEAR-MONTH-DATE-blog_title.MARKUP format. You have control over the permalinks it will generate, but the names of the files are fixed.

Hyde

Hyde helpfully offers to generate a “basic website” for newcomers - which, as mentioned before, doesn’t work, but gives you a basic idea of what Hyde looks like and a settings.py file to work with. You need to comment out a good deal of (not initially useful) lines in settings.py to get you started.

Hyde compartmentalizes its files a bit more than Jekyll:

layout - files used as templates for the content (set using LAYOUT_DIR in settings.py);

content - where the content resides (set with CONTENT_DIR). These files will be processed by Hyde and the templates in layout will be applied according to each file’s individual preference, similar but not exactly like Jekyll’s YAML Front Matter;

media - images, stylesheets, etc (MEDIA_DIR). These are files that are copied (but may be pre-processed) to the output folder preserving their hierarchical structure;

deploy - the folder to which Hyde outputs the static website (DEPLOY_DIR). Its Jekyll equivalent is the _site folder.

Advanced Configuration and Options

Aside from the caveat regarding Hyde’s generated “basic website” and settings.py, neither engine requires any further configuration to start working on your website, but both offer more advanced options, and in both cases most of these options are configurable through settings.py in Hyde’s case and _config.yml in Jekyll’s.

Some of the other options come from a combination of usage and configuration. For example, Hyde allows you to use a different Markdown engine, markdown2, by using a {% markdown2 %} tag in the content or templates, whereas Jekyll interprets all .markdown files as Markdown syntax but the actual translation engine can be changed in _config.yml using the markdown: [engine] setting, allowing you to switch from the default maruku to RDiscount or another similar engine.

This touches on the first and perhaps largest difference between the two engines: Hyde makes use of template tags for processing, while Jekyll relies on the file extension to determine the type of markup for the content present within it. As a result, Hyde allows you to use multiple engines within the same content file: you can freely mix Markdown and Textile within a single file, if that’s something you’d want to do, but at the expense of having your content sprinkled with Django tags.

Hyde also makes heavy use of pre-processors and post-processors when transforming the content and support files and allows you, among others, to minify your JavaScript files (using JSMin) or to optimize them using the Closure Compiler, to code your CSS using SASS or Less CSS or Stylus, or even generate thumbnails for your images.
Of course, you’d have to install the appropriate Python packages for these pre-processors, for example you would need the PIL - Python Imaging Library to make the thumbnails pre-processor work. These pre-processors are enumerated in specific lists within settings.py, e.g:

Oh, and cherry on the cake, both have support for Growl - built-in Hyde and through a plugin in Jekyll, although they both generate the files so fast I don’t see why you would need it.

The Content and the Templating Language

Hyde uses the Django templating language while Jekyll uses the similar, but less complex/powerful, Liquid.
If you’re familiar with Django, you’ll be at home with Liquid. If you’re very familiar with Django, you’ll notice pretty fast that Liquid is missing one very significant feature: blocks. We’ll talk about this later - I just wanted to get it out of the way.

A Simple Page

In both cases, you will pair a content file with one or more template files.Let’s start with Jekyll and a very simple “about” page, which will start out as an ./about.markdown file and end up in ./_site/about.html.

---
layout: page
title: About
---
This sample shows how to build a very simple
[Jekyll](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll) powered website.

The first section of the about.markdown file, between the --- markers is the YAML Front Matter. Jekyll requires it on all files you’d like to have processed, otherwise the file will be ignored and copied to the output as is. The layout property tells Jekyll what template to use when processing this file, so in this case Jekyll expects there is a ./_layouts/page.html file, which in my example looks something like this:

Three quick things as this is a comparison more than an introduction to the templating language: the {{ page.title }} gets replaced by the title parameter from about.markdown’s YAML Front Matter section; the {{ content }} will contain the processed body of the about.markdown; and, finally, because page.html contains it’s own YAML Front Matter section, it will be further processed using ./_layouts/base.html.base.html will then look very similar:

In Django, blocks in child files overwrite blocks in the parent they inherit from (the {% extends "base.html%} specifies the parent of a template). As such, the content block in the page.html template will replace the similar block in the parent base.html. Finally, let’s examine Hyde’s version of the “about” page, ./content/about.html:

Notice how the content block of page.html replaces the parent’s, and the article block of about.html replaces the similar block defined in page.html. With Hyde a child page can overwrite any of the blocks defined in any its ancestors; contrast with Jekyll where a child can only overwrite the parent’s {{ content }} declaration.
Your probably figured out that the {% hyde %} block is the rough equivalent of YAML Front Matter header.

Dynamic Page - The Blog

To create a blog page, that is to generate a dynamic page that essentially includes other pages, Jekyll and Hyde offer similar mechanisms, but they go a different way about it. Jekyll is more opinionated and requires that your blog posts are a) stored within the _posts folder and b) that they follow a very specific naming convention: YEAR-MONTH-DATE-blog_title.MARKUP, where MARKUP would be either markdown or textile. If you do so, you will be able to use a construct in your templates that will iterate over the posts in reverse order by the date within the file name. For example, to output the list of the last 3 posts you would write:

site.posts (or paginator.posts if you enable pagination in _config.yml) contains all your posts regardless of the structure you have in place inside the _posts folder. I think this is nice because it allows you to organize your posts however you think it’s best for you.
Variables added to the YAML Front Matter are available to you through the post variable. I am making use of this feature in the example website to show how one could provide an abstract of a post through the post.abstract atom.

In contrast, Hyde doesn’t really care about any particular structure. From within any file you can enumerate its siblings and children and even access its ancestor (parent folder). The templating guide has a good deal more information, but you’ll deal with the following variables:

The page variable, which refers to the current page; for example, within index.html, page refers to the index.html file;

page.node refers to the directory in which page exists (./content/ in the case of ./content/index.html);

page.node.walk provides a list of all the children, depth first, of the node, the page itself included as the first node.

page.node.walk_pages provides the same except it excludes the folders.

In practice, you could use Hyde, with its multiple “dynamic” sources, to build any kind of websites (for example a documentation website), whereas Jekyll, with it’s single “dynamic” source, seems heavily slanted towards blogging.
However, this comes at a price: for simple types of websites working with Hyde tends to require more effort. Examine the equivalent of the Jekyll index.html posted above:

Considerably more involved, I would think. Also one of the reasons I started writing this post and providing the sample website: the lack of Hyde documentation beyond laconic enumeration of the features. Some of the documentation mentions inexistent examples, and overall it just makes it unnecessarily hard to figure out even some of the basic details on how you are supposed to be using the engine.

Both engines support tags or categories for posts, and they define them the same way: in the YAML Front Matter for Jekyll and the {% hyde %} block for Hyde. You can access these categories in Jekyll through the site.categories variable, which collects all the categories defined in all posts. Hyde requires that you first configure a site pre-processor which will enable category access through the categories variable.

Part of the templating language, both Jekyll and Hyde allow you to include other files (my example includes a nav.html file) using the {% include FILE %}; less obvious is that Jekyll looks for these files in the _includes folder, whereas Hyde looks for it in the content folder.

Read through Hyde’s templating guide to discover more about what the page, page.node, and site variables offer. The Jekyll equivalent can be found on the template data wiki page.

Miscellaneous Features and Considerations

Both engines come with a built-in web server that allows you to quickly check how the generated content will look like. Jekyll’s is based on WEBrick and Hyde’s on CherryPy, so you will need to have the respective gem or egg installed. One of the features that makes Jekyll stand out is that it combines the server with a directory watcher which will continuously regenerate the files that have changed (run jekyll --auto --server), whereas for Hyde you will need to run the regen command each time you change a file by running python /path/to/hyde.py -g.
In practice, this is an incredible time saver and Jekyll processes only the files that change so it is very, very quick. To give you an idea how fast this process is, consider that I have MacVim set to save the files whenever the window loses focus; I can Cmd-Tab to the browser window and by the time I get to issue the refresh page command, the changed file has already been processed.

To get the same functionality, as I was working through the sample website for Hyde, I ended up backgrounding the webserver (started with python /path/to/hyde.py -w), and executing the regen command each time I would need to see the output. Unfortunately, Hyde seems to reprocess the entire website; it still is fast because the site is small, but it’s something to consider when selecting your engine.

When it comes to extensibility, Hyde offers a good deal of built-in site, media, and content pre-processors and the vast library of Django snippets, whereas Jekyll relies on plugins (a good collection of simple plugins written/compiled by Jose Gonzalez) to augment its functionality and to provide supplemental tags for Liquid.

Another factor to consider is whether you have an existing blog. If it runs on Wordpress, you’re in luck: both Jekyll and Hyde offer migrators / importers. The edge goes to Jekyll whose migrator list is quite extensive: Drupal, Movable Type, Typo 4, TextPattern, Blogger/Blogspot, and all else failing, you have good ol’ CSV.

And finally, deploying your site to its final location is an exercise in simply copying the output folder, perhaps using a tool like rsync to speed it up. Hyde has an interesting project in Clyde which is an web editor for your pages, which would allow you to edit your site untethered from the computer on which you normally edit your site. As of right now, Clyde is not fully complete or stable, but that might be something that would sway your vote, so I thought you should know.

Conclusion

Jekyll is considerably easier to get up and run with, has plenty of examples, a strong presence in github behind it, and where it’s lacking it can be extended with plugins. That Liquid is such a close implementation of the Django templating language is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because you can look at existing Django examples, and a curse because not all those examples will work, and because you will not be able to take advantage of the large library of filters and tags available for Django.

Hyde on the other hand benefits immediately from the power of the Django templating language, the considerate flexibility that comes with it, as well as most of the tags and filters available through the Django snippets library. It takes more effort to get it up and develop your initial wireframe, and there is not much help if you get off the beaten path, but those costs might be offset if you require the more advanced features Hyde provides, including the one possibly killer features in the Clyde web editor, once it’s complete and stable.

If you’re considering running your website off github’s infrastructure, choosing Jekyll is pretty much a no-brainer. If you run it on your own infrastructure, I hope this post and the accompanying sample gave you enough information to make an informed guess about the direction you want to pursue.